The latest blast of great distros continues with Xandros Desktop. Xandros is another debian based distro, geared toward the desktop and promising good Windows compatibility. Our initial impression of Xandros is very positive. It lives up to a lot of its potential, with a few drawbacks.

Xandros comes on one CD with a fairly thick manual (more than 200 pages) and is priced at $99 . We don’t usually bother with manuals but new users will appreciate having this documentation at their fingertips. It’s written in a clear, easy-to-read manner, covers a lot of topics and will be very helpful to novices coming over to Linux from Windows. We wish every desktop-oriented distros came with similar in-depth documentation.

Installation

Xandros has a very good install routine; it has a few problems but overall we were pleased.

Xandros offers an Express or Custom install. We choose the Custom install – which gave us three options:

Minimal Desktop

Standard Desktop

Complete Desktop

We opted for the standard desktop which offers a good selection of software without the programming tools and other things found in the Complete Desktop. There were a couple of odd things about the Standard Desktop though – the Gimp and Kmail aren’t installed as part of it (the checkboxes next to them in the selection list are empty). We had to manually click them. This is an oversight, since the Gimp is such an important desktop application and KMail is usually a part of the KDE desktop. Both should be added to the Standard Desktop option.

Another thing we didn’t like: in some cases we could not choose individual packages. For example, we could select the Games/Arcade option but not individual packages from that category. Installation routines should provide the option to pick individual packages along with broad categories.

Xandros comes with its own disk manager. During our install we were given the following options:

Use free space.

Take over disk or partition.

Resize a Windows partition.

Manage disks and partitions (experts only).

We opted to go with the third choice and installed Xandros on an existing machine with an 80GB Windows 2000 NTFS partition on it. With Xandros’ disk manager we easily resized the Windows partition. The resizing took just a few minutes and then our installation began. Total install time was about twenty minutes and went off without a hitch. This is a pretty fast install compared to some distros such as Red Hat or Suse, though it’s not quite the speed demon that Lindows was when we looked at it. Still, we can live with a 20 minute install.

Xandros found our ethernet card (in fact it found two since we also had an Nvida Nforce on that machine as well as a separate Netgear card) and configured it appropriately.

We picked a root password, with the additional security options of strong passwords and making users home folders private. We then set up our user account. Xandros, as compared to Lindows, keeps the distinction between administrator and use separate. This keeps users from running their machines as root  a potentially dangerous option.

Another plus: Xandros found our Nvidia card, installed the drivers AND configured it for 3D acceleration automatically! This should be standard for all distros – we can’t stand being bothered with configuring drivers, recompiling kernels or doing any other drudge work to get 3D acceleration working.

We installed the Linux version of Tribes 2 and had absolutely no problems running it. We ran Tux Racer and Tuxkart as well. We didn’t have to do a thing in terms of configuring our video card or drivers – everything just worked. Which is the way it should be in EVERY distro. Hats off to Xandros for making 3D acceleration as easy as the rest of their installation.

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